I realize I am a little late getting to the party, but I have just discovered the wonderful prose of Anosh Irani, a native of Mumbai now living in Vancouver.

On the radio the other day I heard a review or discussion of his latest novel, Dahanu Road. I was intrigued enough to order it from the local library. There was a waiting list and so I satisfied myself with an earlier novel, The Song of Kahunsha. I couldn’t put it down and for the last couple of days it has been competing for my attention with the completion of my own book. Now I have finished both!

The Song of Kahunsha is a tough novel about kids living on the streets in Mumbai. It pulls no punches and has no Hollywood ending. The prose is taut, spare, brilliant. It has made me even keener to read the new novel and to find a copy of his earlier The Cripple and His Talisman. A fine writer and I am glad to made his discovery.

Last night I finished the first draft of my history of Commercial Drive. 80,000 words and about a year of my life. Wow, what a feeling to have finished, I can tell you. I’ll take a day off and then settle down to the almost equally daunting task of composing winning Book Proposal letters!

More social, cultural and marketing data is available from one of the latest Pew Research papers. This time they show that a “record 14.6% of all new marriages in the United States in 2008 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another.”

That figure is an estimated six times the intermarriage rate among newlyweds in 1960 and more than double the rate in 1980. This dramatic increase has been driven in part by the weakening of longstanding cultural taboos against intermarriage and in part by a large, multi-decade wave of immigrants from Latin America and Asia …

Another way to measure trends in intermarriage is to look at the full universe of all currently married adults (regardless of when they married). In 2008, a record 8% of currently married adults had a spouse of a different race or ethnicity. In 1980, this figure was 3.2%.

If this keeps up, pretty soon we won’t even mention it. The full report is well worth reading.